L.A. Testing New, Simplified Parking Signs that Every City Should Use—and they Have Bluetooth

Steve Siler

Apr 9, 2015

L.A. Mayor's Office and Sara Welch/KTLA

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Los Angeles is a city built by and built around cars. And as is well known, there are a lot of cars there. Thing is, every driver of every car in L.A. eventually needs to find a place to park. Alas, finding a spot—at least of the legal, on-street variety—is a task not easily done nor understood. Behold L.A.’s new, simplified parking signs that convey parking restrictions in multicolor grid form, not wordy lines of text in varying fonts and sizes.

The signs are the brainchild of designer Nikki Sylianteng, who started the project early last year after—what else?—receiving a parking ticket, and they ultimately caught the eyes of the powers that be in Los Angeles. The tall signs might seem a bit complicated at first glance, but that’s only until you envision how many placards it would take to convey the same information in the traditional way, particularly on streets with periodic tow-away zones and other restrictions. Once you get used to the graphic style, the signs’ sensibility is clear.

The first of these new signs was installed by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti himself. It’s one of 100 going up in downtown L.A. (on Spring and Main Streets between 2nd and 9th Streets, for our L.A.-based readers) as part of a six-month pilot program to help folks avoid a ticket or a trip to the impound lot. If successful, the sign design will be adopted city-wide, and could—and should—be emulated by other municipalities. (Ahem, Culver City.)

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“Some of these sign poles are simply out of control, so we should be taking common-sense steps to cut the confusion,” said Mayor Garcetti. Councilmember Paul Krekorian put it another way: “We want to revolutionize the parking experience by making it easy for people to read and understand parking signs. You shouldn’t have to read hieroglyphics to avoid a parking ticket in Los Angeles.”

L.A. Mayor's Office and Sara Welch/KTLA

Just as significant, the new signs also contain Bluetooth beacon technology to interact with smartphone apps as well as possibly enable payment via phone in metered zones. We also imagine that, in the distant future, they could communicate with autonomous cars, broadcasting legal parking zones as the vehicles valet themselves after dropping off passengers at the Disney Concert Hall or some other destination. A QR code on each current sign directs people to parkinginfo.lacity.org, where they can get help in decoding the grid, although we suspect that anyone who knows what a QR code is would be able figure out the sign in the first place.